


Impossible Magic

by lorata



Category: Enchanted Forest Chronicles - Patricia Wrede
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/M, Gen, Magic, Mother-Son Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 08:23:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13072971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorata/pseuds/lorata
Summary: (Time goes by so slowly / and time can do so much)Daystar must always destroy the barrier, enter the castle and find his father. He must always be at least sixteen years old when he did so in order to wield the sword. But what if — what if he had been sixteen years old already when the wizards cast their spells? What if Cimorene could fix it so no one had to wait very long at all?In that case,whatshe and Daystar would one day do need not be changed; it was only a matter ofwhen.In which Cimorene ignores thaumaturgical convention and decides to get those sixteen years back.





	1. In which Cimorene does uncomfortable math and is exasperated with magical theoreticians

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AlexElizabeth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlexElizabeth/gifts).



> Well, this one definitely got away from me .... thank you to my betas, redletters and ellenthebold, and everyone who put up with my screaming and shrieking -- especially my friends who aren't in this fandom but helped me figure out the theoretical magic anyway. AlexElizabeth, I hope you enjoy!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The plan was a good one, really. The problem, Cimorene realizes, is that sixteen years is a really, really long time.

Cimorene crossed the threshold of her new home for the first and final time, and a strange pressure built up in her throat and behind her eyes. Several confused moments passed, wherein Cimorene spun and checked the air for the telltale flickering of spell remnants or tendrils of chokevine before she recognized the sensation as the urge to cry.

Cimorene couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually cried. When Father cancelled her fencing lessons, or her magic lessons, or the cooking or the Latin or the juggling or any of the other ways Cimorene tried to take control of her tedious days as a child, she had not burst into tears. Cimorene had channelled her frustration into action, bullying a new tutor into teaching her new skills, sneaking out to provide herself new occupation; crying had seemed an awful waste of time, and messy and inconvenient besides. She’d never seen the point.

The years had not changed Cimorene’s mind. When Kazul disappeared, when Mendanbar first went missing, every time the most important people in Cimorene’s life were taken from her, Cimorene had not let herself give in to despair. It was always better to make a plan and _do_ something about it, and through three years of disasters and misadventures, Cimorene had done just that. There could hardly be time for feeling sorry for oneself when there were dragons and firewitches and wizards and magic carpets and giants and danger at every corner, not to mention good friends to help her through it.

Of course, now there would be no more adventures, or danger, and no more company of good friends, not for sixteen long years. They couldn’t risk it, not when every communication risked detection by the wizards, and they’d all agreed. Cimorene had come up with the plan, had even argued for it when Kazul and the others tried to dissuade her. It made the most sense, she’d said, putting her hands on her hips and giving them her best, most Queenlike stare. There was no point in trying to dissuade her.

She hadn’t let herself think about what that meant, not really. She couldn’t. If she had then she might have faltered, and Cimorene couldn’t falter, not when Kazul would have leapt at the slightest hesitation and used it to try to countermand the decision. Cimorene had needed to be more certain than she’d ever been in her life, and so she’d let herself glide past the day to day and focused on the broad sweep of things. The dragons thought sixteen years an eye-blink, and Cimorene tricked herself into thinking so, too.

Cimorene kept up this perspective until she stepped through the door into the plain, serviceable cottage and found it dark and somewhat chilly. There were no friends or companions or even Willin waiting for her, no tasks laid out in front of her. Worse, Cimorene had no exciting quests waiting for her around the corner. The sixteen years stretched out ahead, long and empty and yawning in a vast chasm, and Cimorene felt their weight as though she’d jumped into a lake wearing a heavy, jewel-laden gown and attempted to swim.

For a moment Cimorene almost considered crying, if only for the sheer novelty. What would it matter if she took a minute — even an hour — to cry, alone in her house, with no one to see and judge her? She had half a lifetime ahead of her — as many years as she’d lived before meeting Kazul and Morwen and starting her new life in the first place — and plenty of time to be strong and brave and appropriately stoic in the face of trial after, once she figured out what to do with it. And after all, no one was watching.

Cimorene looked down to see Daystar, wrapped tight against her chest in a woven shawl, looking up at her with his father’s wide, solemn grey eyes. “Mama?” he said, and reached up one hand to touch his soft fingers to her cheek.

At once the spell of melancholy broke, and Cimorene laughed. She swiped a hand across her eyes — her fingers came away dry — and took Daystar’s hand in hers, bending to kiss his knuckles. “Well,” said Cimorene, matter of fact. “That’s enough of that.”

Cimorene lit the lamps, and she lifted Daystar out of the sling and into her arms so he could explore the cottage at height. He reached for anything remotely shiny, clapped at the dancing shadows cast by the lamplight on the ceiling, and together they explored their new home. Cimorene smiled at the kitchen, stocked with pots and pans and utensils that would not look out of place in a peasant’s cottage at a glance, but which she knew would not rust or chip or crack with any ease. At last she lit the hearth, and as the flames danced and crackled and the warmth chased away the draughts and the last of the seeping chill, Cimorene sat in front of the fire with Daystar dozing in her lap and let herself feel.

She and Mendanbar had scarcely been married a year when the wizards took him. By the time Cimorene got him back, they would be separated seventeen times longer than they’d been together, and moreover — as the math continued to calculate itself in her mind in a relentless march — that meant Cimorene would be in her fifties by the time they managed to make up for all those lost years. That felt so far away as to be almost laughable, especially given that only four years ago Cimorene had been bored and ready to chew off her own arm back in Linderwall.

The problem, Cimorene thought to herself, was lack of occupation. As Kazul’s princess, and then her Chief Cook and Librarian, Cimorene had no end of tasks to keep herself occupied. Keredwel and the other princesses, on the other hand, with nothing to do but sit in their caves and bemoan their tragic fates, had soon fallen prey to ill humour and malaise. Certainly, raising a child on her own would provide its own challenge, but Cimorene needed to find something else, a way to keep her mind occupied so that it could not wander and get into trouble on gloomy shores.

Daystar’s breathing slowed as he moved from drowsiness into a deep sleep, and Cimorene carried him to bed, laying him down in his high-railed cot. Cimorene looked around her bedroom, pleased in spite of herself at the simple furnishings, the enchanted wardrobe from Kazul’s caves disguised in the corner as an ordinary piece of furniture, then stopped at the sight of a door at the far end.

She didn’t recall a door on the far side when exploring earlier, nor the space for a closet. Cimorene frowned, an expression which only deepened when the handle didn’t turn. After a few attempts, an idea tickled the back of Cimorene’s mind, and she took a step back. After glancing at Daystar, still sleeping soundly, Cimorene took a deep breath and chanted under her breath:

_By night and flame and shining rock,_

_Open thou thy hidden lock,_

_Alberolingarn!_

A pause just long enough for Cimorene to feel exceedingly silly, and then the door swung open. Cimorene stepped through into the room beyond and let out a delighted laugh.

Inside the enchanted space stood rows of bookshelves, packed full of beautiful, leather-bound volumes. Among the assorted books Cimorene recognized the aging, cracked spines of Kazul’s library, the neat covers and precise labelling system from Morwen’s personal collection, and even — miracle of miracles — a number of scrolls and tomes that someone had somehow managed to wheedle away from Telemain. Cimorene ran her gaze along the spines, scanning the titles, and noted everything from histories to magical treatises to advanced theory. Along the back wall was a rack of swords, including one that matched Cimorene’s reach and a few of increasing size that would be perfect for a growing boy some years down the line. Another wall contained shelves of various magical paraphernalia and common spell ingredients, just in case, and Cimorene looked around the room and felt a warm glow of warmth and affection.

A note lay on the table, and Cimorene picked it up to find Morwen’s neat, unadorned handwriting. _Everyone needs a little space to themselves,_ it read. _Really_ , _I expect you’ll astonish us all by the time you get back._

This time Cimorene’s eyes did sting, but she felt no shame in wiping away the trickle of moisture. Already she missed her friends with a fierceness that ached, but the thought of Morwen’s bracing frankness brought Cimorene a fresh wave of comfort. And just think — with a private library at her disposal and her own space to study magic, perhaps Cimorene might surprise the wizards with a few discoveries of her own.

She lost herself in the pages until Daystar stirred in the next room, and Cimorene tore herself away from her reading with reluctance until she reminded herself she could return any time. This was her library, her life; she was no longer a princess or a queen, and no one was here to argue that any knowledge was improper. Certainly Daystar would be raised with good manners enough not to go poking around in his mother’s room without permission, even if he did think to try obscure dragon spells on her closet door.

Cimorene smiled as she left her books on the table and closed the door behind her, lifting Daystar from his cot and bouncing him against her shoulder. “I think we’re going to do just fine here, Daystar,” she said, and poked him in the nose to make him laugh.

 

* * *

 

Cimorene dug the points of her knuckles into the inside hollows of her eye sockets just below her brow bone and let out a very loud, very un-queenlike groan. Daystar looked up from where he was gnawing on a piece of wood wrapped in soft cloth, his eyes wide and inquisitive as always. Cimorene sighed and set the book down gently, rather than throwing it across the room as her temper would have preferred.

“Listen to me, Daystar,” Cimorene said, pointing to him in mock-seriousness. “If you grow up to write magical treatises, I want you to promise to use language that actual people can understand. There is no need to use all this mystical sounding mumbo-jumbo to obfuscate what you’re trying to say. You don’t become more intelligent the fewer people can understand you.”

Daystar gummed his chew toy for a moment, then popped it out of his mouth and waved it with an emphatic, “Ba!”

“Exactly,” Cimorene said with a sharp nod. “I’m glad you understand.” She turned back to the unnecessarily-titled tome and gave it a dour stare. She couldn’t help thinking that Morwen had always managed to discuss even the most complex magic without ever finding the need to do backflips through six-syllable words to make her point, despite attending the same magical institution as Telemain.

Cimorene’s childhood magic tutor had not bothered much with theory when moonlighting with his bored twelve-year-old pupil. He had taught her the spells and she had learned them with an uncanny speed and accuracy, but they hadn’t much time to sit down and break apart what made them work, how the various elements twisted together to create and shape the magic itself. This meant that while Cimorene could perform magic and follow instructions in a spell-book without any trouble, she could not accurately substitute ingredients to make up for a shortfall, or come up with any new spells herself based on innovations in magical theory.

Not unlike the inability to cook without following a recipe, Cimorene thought, remembering her early days with Kazul, but the memory filled her with a sense of determination. She had learned to cook without the need to consult the books for every measurement, every exchange of ingredients; magic was not as simple as creaming eggs and butter, but Cimorene would learn. She had chafed each occasion she’d been forced to ask someone to explain Telemain’s jargon to her, but there had never been time to sit down and chew through the ridiculously complex theory tomes enough to build up her fundamentals.

Cimorene narrowed her eyes and flipped open the book to the index, abandoning her straight-through approach for now and skimming for anything that caught her interest. Near the end her eye snagged on the word ‘temporal’, and Cimorene jerked to a stop, her heart beating a hard staccato in her chest. Paging back to the appropriate section, Cimorene let out a breath as she found herself staring down at a chapter entitled “Postulations on Thaumaturgy as a Means to Induce Temporal Distortion: Theory and Potential Applications”.

With a freshly snipped quill, a pot of ink and a stack of blank pages at her elbow, Cimorene focused on the ridiculously convoluted paragraphs and got to work.

 

* * *

 

Magical theory was no less dry than Cimorene remembered it from her previous forays, and the addition of Daystar demanding attention every few minutes definitely did not expedite the process, but gradually she worked her way through the chapter and made reasonable headway. Once she’d completed her notes, Cimorene set the volume aside and went on to check the other works in her library, scouring them for any references to theoretical magic on the alteration of time.

Most magical scholars took a dim view of the possibility of time travel, which rather surprised Cimorene, given how much magical study was given over to spatial dynamics: moving people and objects across great distances in a blink of an eye or expanding the inside of an ordinary bag to fit the contents of a large pantry. She would have thought that magicians would have been tripping over their robes to unlock the key to moving through time as easily as they rippled through open space. Still, the prevailing attitude was negative, calling it fluff, philosophical twaddle, pure conjecture, or, rather memorably, “pure theoretical fiddle-faddle, a mental thought exercise designed to stun and impress the uneducated and easily-awed dinner guest at dull gatherings.”

Others fulminated against the lack of rigour in reporting results, with many citing a prominent magician named Pembroke Newcomb McDewey, who claimed to have gone back in time. When asked to provide a demonstration, McDewey stated only, “By travelling into the past to provide you with proof, the incident in question will have already occurred before I leave from our current perspective. You have only to look at chronicles of history to find evidence of my presence.” The fact that McDewey was never seen again, and that an enthusiastic society of conspiracy theorists sprang up in his wake, dedicated to trawling historical records in search of any trace of him, only served to further infuriate the serious thaumaturgical community.

(Cimorene would rather liked to have set the Academy for Practicable Theoretical Magic against the Linderwall court philosopher. It would have made for a solid afternoon of entertainment at the very least.)

While these accounts were entertaining — once Cimorene made it through the multiple layers of jargon and needlessly discursive sentences — they didn’t help with the idea tickling the back of Cimorene’s mind. She refused to let herself chase it with too much fervour, afraid she might spook it or get herself too attached to the impossible, but even after half a dozen separate works decried the field, Cimorene kept searching. If her time as Queen had taught her anything, it’s that no one would be this angry about the idea of temporal magic unless someone existed who took it seriously. She could only hope her library contained at least one of them.

As the days, weeks and months passed, Cimorene fell into a routine. She and Daystar woke early, ate breakfast and went for a walk together down the long dirt path that led from their cottage away from the Enchanted Forest. The Forest called to her every morning, the soft murmur of its leaves and the faint hum of magic like a distant whisper, but Cimorene couldn’t risk it. One chatty squirrel or enthusiastic elf eager to brag to their friends about who they’d seen and all her efforts could be for nothing. Instead she gathered what she needed from the ordinary woods a half-hour’s walk away before heading back.

Most of Cimorene’s days were spent with Daystar or keeping up with the cottage life — cooking, cleaning, maintenance, gardening, procuring food — but she managed to carve out an hour or two each day for her magical research while Daystar napped or entertained himself on his blanket with his collection of crude, hand-carved toys.

A pattern slowly developed as Cimorene covered page after page with notes culled from her readings. If anyone had attempted any sort of practical experiments regarding temporal distortion, they hadn’t made any kind of success significant enough to warrant publication. Everything was extremely cagily written, couched in even more muddled terms than usual, with every single statement preceded by a long-winded disclaimer.

Once she worked her way past that, the prevailing theories appeared to agree that if it were possible to travel through time, the ability to alter events would be limited. Fortunately — or not — Cimorene was very familiar with the concept of magical snapback thanks to Telemain and his transportation exertions, and she managed to work through this section with relative ease. A small but significant handful of writers believed that in the event of a temporal distortion, any changes to fixed events would cause an ever-widening cascade of ripples until the magic eventually snapped, causing the chronology of the universe to forcibly rewrite itself. This would — hypothetically, of course — throw the caster into an altered present, where the events they spurred had already occurred and shaped the existing past.

This was compounded by an additional theory, that major events, such as death or incidents experienced by a large number of people that entered into public knowledge, were considered “locked” in time and could not be undone, only modified, similar to the working of a witch’s curse. Attempting to change a locked event in the past would have as disastrous a result as trying to avoid the outcome of a curse or prophesy; far smarter, the scholars argued, to work around the locked events, much like the more enterprising accursed might hire a third party to work a less drastic clause onto the original curse. Moreover, the greater the change, the sooner the snapback; a circumspect traveller might explore the past at their leisure with nothing more than a few ripples, but any alterations surrounding a locked event would certainly cause the thread to break.

Cimorene pushed her notes away from her and frowned, swallowing a wave of frustration. If these theories were correct, then the wizards attacking the castle and sealing Mendanbar away would certainly count as a locked event, and attempting to go back far enough to stop it from happening would only cause something much worse. None of the scholars deigned to speculate on what that might be, but if regular magical snapback could cause vomiting and unconsciousness for days on end, Cimorene didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about anything on a larger scale.

_Entirely hypothetical_ , of course. By the time Cimorene collected a full stack of notes on the matter, she was ready to start setting fires every time she came across the dreaded word.

“Daystar, I’ve changed my mind,” Cimorene called. Daystar rolled over onto his stomach and pulled himself forward on his arms, gripping at the floor with his fists, until he came to rest beneath her chair. “You are not allowed to become a theoretical magician whatsoever. Mother forbids it.”

“ _Bih_ ,” Daystar repeated, twisting his face into a replica of Cimorene’s exasperated expression before it collapsed into a delighted grin.

“Yes, exactly, I forbid you,” Cimorene said, mock-sternly, and lifted him into her lap. Back in the old days she would take a walk through the Caves or visit Morwen for a cup of tea and a complaining session, but a good, solid hike through the non-enchanted forest trails with Daystar at her back would have to do.

 

* * *

 

A few nights later, Cimorene jolted awake in the middle of the night. Daystar, mercifully, still slept, and outside her window the branches stirred in the calm nighttime breeze. The last traces of sleep clung to the edges of her mind, and Cimorene brushed them away like errant cobwebs. If the wizards attacking the castle and imprisoning Mendanbar acted as fixed points in time, then surely so must Daystar mastering the sword and dismantle the protective enchantment surrounding the castle at sixteen. Cimorene already planned to raise Daystar to be the hero he’d need to become without him knowing so that he could defeat the wizards and save his father; these events were already in motion toward a future fixed point. However, what if she could bring them all together?

Daystar must always destroy the barrier, enter the castle and find his father. He must always be at least sixteen years old when he did so in order to wield the sword. But what if — _what if_ he had been sixteen years old already when the wizards cast their spells? What if Cimorene could fix it so no one had to wait very long at all?

In that case, _what_ she and Daystar would one day do need not be changed; it was only a matter of _when_.

Hypothetical, theoretical, impossible, preposterous: the words flew at Cimorene’s face, but she batted them away like overenthusiastic hummingbirds. Every magical discovery had been impossible once upon a time, and curiosity could be no stronger a motivator than desperation and pure determination. Cimorene threw back the blankets and stood, restless energy driving her out of bed to pace the room, until finally she stood over Daystar’s cot and watched him sleep, one arm flung above his head as he lay sprawled on his back.

Cimorene reached one hand down and brushed one finger across Daystar’s forehead. So much pressure on a child who couldn’t know his destiny until he was sent off to do it, and while Cimorene would do her best to raise him to be equal to the task, if she could do anything to help — to create a life for him where he could live without that burden —

Yes. She had to try. And if that meant diving head-first into the impossible to attempt something the magical community considered patently ridiculous, not to mention _simply not done_ — that sounded very much like what Cimorene had been doing her entire life. If nothing else, none of those things had ever stopped her before.

* * *

 

The revelation with Cimorene’s magical studies didn’t come in one big wave so much as it did a hundred little ones over the course of Daystar’s childhood. With nowhere to start, Cimorene did the best she could: she started at the beginning, taking things apart to figure out how they worked. Daystar provided accidental motivation more than once; he was a curious child, and often asked follow-up questions to the stories Cimorene told him that involved tales of magic.

“How did the dwarf turn the straw into gold?”

“How do seven-league boots work?”

“How can cabbages turn someone into a donkey?”

“How did the old lady become a young lady again?”

Cimorene had asked many of the same questions when she was a girl, although of course her nurse had only responded with a fondly exasperated “Because _magic_ , dear!”

Cimorene had never enjoyed that answer as a child, and she would never dream of brushing off Daystar in the same way; the challenge here was giving him a response that didn’t tip him off that she was anything more than an ordinary woman living in a cottage in the woods. At least Daystar, while inquisitive, did not seem inclined to question his mother about her life choices, and he took Cimorene’s knowledge as the sort of thing one learns if one is simply curious and well-versed about the workings of the world the world.

Daystar’s imagination caught particularly on the idea of age-altering potions. “You said youth potions make you into you when you were younger, so that’s easy, but what about aging ones? If you drank one, would you turn into _any_ old lady, or would you be _you_ when you’re older?” he asked, eyes bright with excitement. “Or would you be a different old lady every time? Or does it switch you with the body of a real old lady somewhere?”

“First of all,” Cimorene said, giving Daystar a firm look, “Don’t say ‘old lady’, that’s considered impolite. ‘Old woman’ will do if you must, and even then it’s best to see if she’s the sort of person who will be good-humoured about it. As for the rest of it, I’m afraid I don’t know. The stories rarely go into how the magic actually works. Most people don’t think to ask the question.” Daystar beamed. “How do you think it happens?”

Daystar liked that tactic very much, and could spend hours devising imaginary magical theories that grew increasingly implausible as the afternoon stretched on. Cimorene always encouraged him, because as ridiculous as his ideas ended up, anything fresh would be better than staring at piles of DeMontmorencys and Chadburys and Fitwallace-Glosturmances for hours when Cimorene’s brain had turned to mush.

And as it turned out, her breakthrough came thanks to Daystar’s questions about seven-league boots and aging spells.

Seven-league boots, Cimorene told Daystar, did not actually move the wearer across so great a distance at high speed. Moving that fast would be very dangerous and used to cause severe strain on the wearer, and so now, modern boots acted like a mini transportation spell, folding the space between the seven leagues together so that stepping between them took no more effort than an ordinary stride. Daystar frowned at her until Cimorene illustrated, holding the folds of her skirt taut, then bringing her hands together with the fabric bunched between them, then moving the next hand forward to continue with the next ‘step’ until his expression cleared with understanding. And unlike a transportation spell cast by a magician, the boots themselves carried the necessary preparations in their construction, meaning no backlash unless their owner grew careless with maintenance and repair.

Aging spells did not, Cimorene discovered after delving into a particularly dense tome on the deconstruction of non-alchemical thaumaturgical transformations, randomly change the subject into an older or younger person through a simple physical transformation. Cosmetic changes — as Killer found out — could run together and be difficult to remove, and actually transmogrifying a younger person into an older one ran the risk of damage when trying to reverse the spell.

Trying to figure out what the spells _did_ involve took a longer to parse, but eventually — very, very eventually, long after Daystar would have ever forgotten asking the question in the first place — Cimorene managed to work it out. For all that everyone decried the idea of manipulating time, aging spells turned out to do exactly that, creating a localized temporal anomaly around the user in order to age them without creating an actual, physical transformation that might be difficult to reverse. This way the body did not suffer any negative effects from having such a dramatic change forced upon it; in a sense the body didn’t change at all, but time simply cycled around it so quickly that it moved through its own natural state.

It was, of course, a flexible rather than fixed anomaly, since an aging spell couldn’t predict whether the subject would in fact die or lose an important limb before reaching old age, and nothing around the subject actually altered. Maybe this was why most scholars didn’t actually consider it true temporal manipulation, and how they continued to argue that the actual altering of time was a practical impossibility.

The candles on the table were guttering, and Daystar had long since gone to bed as Cimorene stared at the mad scrawl of notes spread over her table. Magical theory, breakdowns of spells and popular magical items, mixed with deconstructions of children’s stories and popular contemporary legends. Her back ached, the crick in her neck had brought a dragon-worthy number of relatives to join the party, and she half wondered whether at this point she hadn’t completely lost her senses and begun conjuring castles out of cobwebs. Yet as she stared, the pieces began to creep together in her mind.

(Cimorene tried very hard not to feel too much like Telemain, muttering to himself in a corner while the rest of them waited in exasperation.)

If someone could take the temporal anomaly created by aging and de-aging spells, and combine them with the space-folding properties of seven-league boots —

— If the precision of the boots’ distance could be mapped onto time —

— If the focus of the aging spell’s time-altering could be shifted from the subject’s physical form while still keeping the effects localized to the subject and their position —

— then maybe someone could create a way to move the user through time at fixed and predictable intervals, forward or back, without creating any adverse effects or creating snapback. At least, until she started changing events in the past, after which the temporal strain would — if all the theory Cimorene had suffered through at the start of her research was correct — eventually snap and send her back to the starting point, with all the ripple effects firmly in place.

Cimorene raised her head, feeling her eyes burning bloodshot in her face. “I am either a genius or I have lost my mind,” she said to the empty room, very glad that her son still had no idea about her nightly activities.

Only one way to find out.

 

* * *

 

Cimorene’s world narrowed to her cottage, the surrounding woods and town, her son and her research. Now that she had her focus — and, after a quick word to one of the more enterprising merchants in the nearby town, a pair of seven-league boots as a base model to begin her experiments — Cimorene’s energy for her pet project returned with a vengeance. She split her days between making her theories a reality and raising Daystar to be a good, honest and respectful boy, and amused herself trying to imagine which task was the more impressive feat in the grand scheme of things.

Certainly the magic proved much more recalcitrant; Daystar showed no sign of growing up a spoiled, sullen princeling under Cimorene’s parentage, polite and eager to please and help his mother around the house, and Cimorene privately adjusted her opinions on princes and princely behaviour. Rather like Mendanbar assuming all princesses had been taught economics and politics and simply ignored them, maybe princes had been raised without anyone showing them the proper way to behave.

Perhaps if all princes had to spend a few years living as poor woodcutters or farmers’ sons they might not be so insufferable — a thought Cimorene would have to keep in mind if her plan worked and Daystar had the chance to live his childhood over in the castle. That didn’t stop Cimorene’s irritation whenever the brash adventuring variety showed up at her door looking for directions, but she did try to keep a bit of perspective.

Cimorene’s years of practice meant she could generally get rid of them quite quickly, at least, even without the threats of Kazul or Willin’s interminable bureaucracy to aid her. Once she was indoors preparing dinner while Daystar chopped more wood for the fire when a visitor passed by, and Cimorene started to head out to shoo him away but stopped at the doorway to see how Daystar would handle it. He was twelve now, growing tall but still lanky, and definitely unassuming in his simple homespun clothing.

He gave directions to the Enchanted Forest with simple courtesy and managed to avoid offering the adventurer — a knight, Cimorene guessed by the armour, too functional and not enough gold to be a prince — any refreshments or a place to rest his feet without coming off as rude or inhospitable. Cimorene nodded to herself, satisfied, but then the knight gave Daystar a considering look and she paused, eyes narrowed.

“Where is your father, then?” the knight asked in that jovial yet presumptuous way that Cimorene had to assume they all learned at school somewhere.

Daystar paused, one hand resting on the handle of the axe. “My mother is inside,” he said. “But she doesn’t like to be disturbed when she’s working.”

“A young lad like you should be out having adventures,” said the knight. Cimorene bit her tongue. “Why don’t you come with me, be my squire? I’m always doing exciting things, you know, rescuing princesses, slaying ogres, fighting dragons —“

(Slaying ogres, Cimorene thought with a silent scoff, when everyone knew ogres scheduled their pillaging for mutual convenience with the rulers of nearby kingdoms? Not likely.)

“Mother taught me to be polite to dragons,” Daystar said, still using the same polite yet implacable tone, and Cimorene made a mental note to give him an extra helping of bread pudding tonight. “And I do appreciate the offer, but I’m quite happy here.”

The knight frowned, glancing back toward the house, Cimorene sighed and began unpinning her hair, as the best way to intimidate unwanted visitors was to stun them with ankle-length jet-black curls rather than service-like braids wrapped inconspicuously around her head. “Are you quite sure?” he asked dubiously. “I was a squire myself at your age, you know, it really is quite the thing. We could even go on a proper quest if you like, you know, explore your heritage and all that.”

Cimorene froze.

Daystar cocked his head to one side. “What do you mean, explore my heritage?”

“Well, that’s what’s done, isn’t it?” said the knight, warming to the idea. “Young boy, no father, living alone in the woods, it’s what you’re meant to do, isn’t it? Everyone wants to know the truth about where they came from, and what better way to do that than with someone who knows what he’s doing to show you around?”

Daystar’s expression turned thoughtful, his grey eyes solemn and so much like Mendanbar’s when he puzzled out a problem that Cimorene’s chest ached — with pride, or missing him, or something deeper. “If I thought it mattered where I came from I wouldn’t need to go on a quest,” he said finally. “I would ask Mother.”

“Ask your _m_ _other_?” the knight sputtered. “But that isn’t —“

“Unless you think she doesn’t know or wouldn’t tell me, which isn’t very polite to say,” Daystar continued. “And I’ve never heard of poor boys going on quests to discover who they really are with an established knight. I thought the whole point of a hero’s journey was to do it alone.”

The knight shifted his weight, expression turning shifty. “Well — I do sort of think these quests are made up so that boys don’t feel bad about growing up with their fathers, you know, give them a way to make a sorry situation seem romantic and heroic and all that, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t!”

“Are you sure you don’t just need a squire?” Daystar asked. Cimorene had to stifle a laugh against the back of her hand. “You seem very keen.”

This time the knight definitely looked uncomfortable. “Well, as a matter of fact, my provisional membership is about to run out, and if I don’t find a squire in the next four days the Brotherhood of Knights might not promote me to full member. I’d heard this kind of area was good for picking up squires, lots of disgruntled goose-herds or pig-keepers, that sort of thing, but no luck.”

“Mother says there’s a very strong farmworkers’ union here,” Daystar said helpfully.

“That would do it,” the knight said mournfully. “Well, if you’re not interested…”

“You might have more luck actually asking for what you want, rather than trying to be sneaky,” Daystar said. “Especially if you’re going to the Enchanted Forest. Mother says it’s best to be very specific.”

The knight peered back toward the cottage, eyes narrowed. “I think I’d best head out before I meet this mother of yours, she sounds rather terrifying,” he said, sounding darkly amused by the idea. “Well, good luck to you, boy, and thank you for the directions.”

Daystar went back to chopping the last of the wood while Cimorene hastily braided and pinned her hair, then made it back to the kitchen before he came in. “Is everything all right?” Cimorene asked as he came in and stacked the wood next to the fireplace. “I heard we had a visitor.”

“Another knight,” Daystar said. “He wasn’t very smart, or polite.”

“That seems to be a pattern,” Cimorene said neutrally, and Daystar laughed. But then he hesitated, fiddling with the stack of logs, rearranging them so they sat just so, and Cimorene frowned. “Daystar, come here.”

He did, hanging his head a little, and actually tucked himself in against Cimorene’s side, ducking his head into the curve of her shoulder. “He said I should come be a squire with him and go on adventures,” Daystar said. “I told him I didn’t want to and I was happy here with you. That’s all right, isn’t it, Mother?”

Cimorene set down her spoon and ran her fingers through Daystar’s hair, unruly like his parents’ no matter how many times he attempted to comb it. “I can’t imagine an education with an impolite, not very smart knight would be very instructive,” Cimorene said, and bent to kiss the top of his head. “Now help me finish up dinner.”


	2. In which Daystar tries very hard not to ask questions, but Cimorene does not make it easy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cimorene puts her plan into action, and things only get somewhat complicated very quickly.

In the end, making the leap from theory to practice had been much less difficult than Cimorene thought it would be. Not that Cimorene would call it _easy_ , but after spending the first eight years or so muddling with the theory, teasing apart the actual spells and combining them to her purpose turned to be rather a lot like cooking after all. Cimorene had to wonder whether the emphatic expostulations about the impossibility were genuine, or whether the magician community had decided to suppress the research — or perhaps to discourage wizards. Cimorene couldn’t say she blamed them, if that were the case. It didn’t take much to imagine the chaos someone like Zemenar could wreak if he ever learned how to go back in time and alter history to his liking.

She tested it as best she could here and there, surreptitiously, nothing that would cause a massive ripple or backlash, and never anything more than a few hours behind. As much as it chafed Cimorene not to be able to put her efforts to serious experimentation — the memories of her sleeve catching fire after substituting fresh feverfew were particularly convincing in that regard — the amount of preparation involved and the magic used was too much of a risk. She only had so many materials, and could not afford to start over if she burned out the boots before she had the chance to go free Mendanbar.

And so Cimorene limited herself to a handful of tiny, inconsequential tests: rescuing Daystar’s favourite childhood toy, which he accidentally broke one afternoon while cleaning, by sliding back a few hours and moving it to a higher shelf; deliberately letting dinner burn so that the smell lingered throughout the house for over an hour despite the open windows before going back to take the pot off the stove in time; breaking the window in the front room when she got up to light the fire and fixing it the night before.

Each time Cimorene successfully managed to avoid her past self, although once she narrowly missed stepping into the room at the same time and found herself nursing a nasty headache for the better part of a few days. Each time Daystar remembered nothing but the most recent version of events, even with Cimorene’s careful, oblique questioning. And each time Cimorene felt herself getting closer to Mendanbar even as the years took them farther apart.

* * *

 

The day Antorell showed up at the cottage, Cimorene melted him before he had a chance to light into whatever self-congratulatory speech he had prepared. She couldn’t risk him recognizing Daystar as her son, or calling her “princess” or anything else that might twig Daystar too soon. Seeing the awe on her son’s face as she melted a wizard in front of him with a word and a gesture gave Cimorene a brief twist of amusement, but Cimorene pushed it aside.

She asked Daystar to clean up the mess, then while he was distracted, Cimorene set off for the Enchanted Forest. Stepping across the boundary for the first time since Daystar was a boy, Cimorene felt the familiar tingle of magic wash over her like the embrace of an old friend. Cimorene didn’t have Mendanbar’s innate connection to the Forest’s magic, but even she sensed the change as the trees grew tall and green around her, whispering and waiting in a way the ordinary woods by her cottage could never be.

Cimorene had missed this, but she didn’t have time to wander and enjoy her first foray home. Antorell had found her, and the only positive part to the whole mess is that he obviously hadn’t told the rest of the Society of Wizards, hoping to get credit for her capture himself. She had her quest to complete, and she knew better than to dally.

Even after all her years away, the Forest didn’t bother to hide the sword from her. Cimorene found its hiding place without a misstep, and as she spoke the words to open the cairn the entire Forest seemed to hold its breath. Cimorene’s heart pounded as she looked down at it, still impossibly bright and sharp and shining without anyone to polish it over these last sixteen years. For a moment she hesitated, not afraid but — cautious, wary.

Cimorene had always been allowed to hold the sword, out of deference to her position as wife and mother to the current and future Kings of the Enchanted Forest, but it had been many years since Cimorene used her title, or even thought of herself as Queen. What if the sword had forgotten? What if it decided she’d waited too long to return?

Waiting about in a flurry certainly wasn’t going to help matters. Cimorene took a deep breath, reached out, and let her hand close over the hilt. A low jolt of magic ran through her arm, but no pain, and it didn’t shake or buzz or shoot sparks or otherwise try to chase her off. Cimorene exhaled and raised the sword, and the tingling died to a low, barely-perceptible murmur.

“I missed you, too,” Cimorene said. “Just wait until you see what I have for you.”

Daystar’s eyes shone with the same intense fascination as when he used to try to play with the sword as a baby. Cimorene watched him track the sword’s movement, his gaze hungry as she carried it through the house — saw the disappointment when she sheathed it in its familiar, ordinary-looking scabbard. Apparently, Daystar couldn’t sense the magic leaking from the sword any more than his father.

“Help me pack us some sandwiches, Daystar,” Cimorene said, as Daystar blinked in surprise and confusion and her own heart took up a drumroll in her chest. “We’re going on an adventure.”

Cimorene did not have Morwen’s magic sleeves, which meant no bottles of cider or anything ridiculous, but it didn’t take them long to fill a pack with some food and travel essentials. Daystar followed instructions without question, even as his eyes kept wandering back to the sword every time they passed the table. Cimorene capped off the preparations by changing into a tunic and leggings — Daystar’s eyes bugged out when she strode back into the room, complete with her enchanted sword strapped to her side — and slung the pack over her back. All in all they’d taken thirty minutes, which combined with the time it took her to retrieve the sword from its hiding place, was about as much time as Cimorene was willing to spend.

“Now, Daystar,” Cimorene said, fixing him with a serious expression. “This is very important. We’re going to go somewhere together, and I’m not going to tell you where or why. You have a task to do, and part of it is to know what you have to do by the time you have to do it.”

Daystar chewed his lip in thought. “But I can’t ask.”

“No.” Cimorene favoured him with a small smile. “But you do get to wear the sword.”

Daystar brightened at that, though his confusion remained steady as Cimorene buckled the sword belt around his waist. To his credit he kept quiet, even though the questions must be bubbling up inside him, even as Cimorene slung the seven-league boots over her shoulder and strode outside.

“I didn’t know we had those,” Daystar said as he recognized the boots for their original purpose, curiosity getting the better of him. He’d said the same about the sword, back when he was thirteen, but left the unspoken question hanging in the air and didn’t push when Cimorene chose to ignore it. “Are we going to use them?”

This one, at least, was a fair question, given that Cimorene only had one pair of boots for the both of them. She’d actually looked into what it would take to try to link two boots together when the wearers had different strides — or how to use one pair of boots between two different people — but the process had been ridiculously complicated. The method she eventually came up with would not win them any points for style or elegance, but at this point Cimorene really did not want to deal with another layer of experimental magic.

“Do you remember when I taught you to dance?” Cimorene asked. “When you were very little?”

Daystar frowned for a moment, then jerked back. “Wait, you mean —“ He stopped, let out a startled laugh. “Mother, I’m as tall as you are! Won’t that be awkward?”

Cimorene headed out a little way down the path, away from the forest, until she came to the spot that she had calculated as the best starting point. “Nothing is awkward unless you choose to let it,” she said firmly. Daystar let out another little laugh, a little incredulous but clearly willing to give it a go, and he stood back and waited as Cimorene dropped the boots to the ground and swapped out her walking boots. When she finished, again throwing her boots over her shoulder by the laces, Cimorene stood in the seven-league boots and carefully centred her weight.

The magic waited, the pause and crackle in the air of lightning overhead before the boom and clap of thunder, and Cimorene’s heart thudded in her chest. Daystar, oblivious to her mood, twisted his face into an exaggerated, humorous grimace and moved in close. “My apologies if I squash your feet, Mother,” he said, and stepped gingerly onto her toes.

It had been some ten years since the last time they’d done this, and Cimorene pushed back a wave of fond memory — Daystar’s head coming level with her midsection, his hands small and soft in hers, the serious look of concentration on his face as he followed her movements — and took his hands in hers. “Think of what a good story this will make years from now,” she said, even as something clenched in her chest.

Daystar wrinkled his nose, and Cimorene let out a quiet, air-filled laugh to quell the flutter of apprehension and took a step forward.

The air rushed around her, the trees a blur. During her tests Cimorene had made the unfortunate discovery that she could entirely uncouple the distance-folding effects of the boots from the spell; the further back in time she travelled, the greater the step. The boots could not be taken past their original limits of seven leagues per stride, but even so, to make it back sixteen years the total journey would end up taking them over a thousand miles in a straight line.

And so, Cimorene had painstakingly mapped out a zig-zagging route that would take them past the Forest, alongside the Mountains of Morning, through a few neighbouring kingdoms and back again. In ordinary use of the boots, the terms of the space-folding enchantment meant they would not be bothered by environmental concerns such as walking through trees or cliffs, and Cimorene had to hope that this would not be ameliorated when adding the element of time. She’d done her best to calculate her route so that they wouldn’t end up walking face-first into a mountainside or land in the middle of a lake, and that would have to do.

After all the years of buildup, the actual time travel itself was rather underwhelming. Rather like dragons, sixteen years meant very little to trees and mountains, so the scenery that Cimorene passed gave her no indication of any movement through time. She did feel an odd shiver that might be nausea or fatigue or a combination of both, but the magic gave no visual indications. Daystar looked vaguely concerned, which meant Cimorene’s face had likely gone pale — a usual side effect of travelling so far using seven-league boots even in ordinary circumstances — but he did not otherwise seem suspicious.

At the halfway point, Cimorene paused to catch her breath as their surroundings resolved around them. They had stopped in a clearing beneath the Mountains of Morning, and if Cimorene had done everything correctly, they should currently be eight years before they left. No way to check that, unfortunately, as Cimorene had not found a spell to give her the exact time and date, but she would find out eventually.

“Are you all right, Mother?” Daystar asked, stepping down from her boots and resting his hand on her arm. “You look tired. Do you need to rest?”

Cimorene’s limbs did rather feel like she had encased them with lead. The boots took most of the strain, of course, but even so, some of the effort filtered through. She thought of the sandwiches in her pack with a sudden ravenous hunger that surprised her, and wondered whether the legendary hunger of heroes might rather have something to do with their method of transport.

Cimorene stayed put, imagining herself rooted to the ground to keep her feet from moving. “Halfway there,” she told him. “A little farther and then we can take a break. Come back now before I accidentally take a step forward and leave you behind.”

Daystar frowned and looked as though he was about to argue until Cimorene sent him a stern look. After that he still glanced at her sidelong, but he rearranged his pack and his sword belt and moved to stand on her feet again.

The rock goblins attacked first.

Cimorene froze as the creatures leapt from the cliffs above, waving their arms in a mad rush. Daystar yelped, rolled out of the way and struggled to pull his sword free. Cimorene reached for her own sword first out of habit, but at the last moment Daystar shouted, “Mother, don’t move!” and she stopped just in time, one foot already beginning to rise.

Cimorene’s breath caught in her throat. She bent, fingers slipping as she fought to unlace the boots and slip her feet free. Once barefoot, Cimorene unsheathed her sword and darted forward, bringing her sword up against a rock goblin’s arm a moment before its fist slammed into Daystar’s side.

“You can’t kill them,” Cimorene called over the slide and scrape of stone on stone and steel. Daystar looked at her, eyes wide, then yelped and took a wild swing, narrowly avoiding a blow that would have knocked him sideways. “Don’t waste time trying to chop apart the stone, you’ll only damage the sword. Aim for the joints and slice through, that will incapacitate them for a while!”

To demonstrate, Cimorene took aim at the nearest rock goblin, letting her sword slice a straight cut through the gap between the creature’s ‘head’ and its body. The steel temporarily severed the connection that bound the two parts together, and the head fell to the ground and rolled away. Cimorene nearly kicked it to the side before recalling her bare feet, thus saving herself from completing the rest of her quest on broken toes, and instead bent and threw it away one-handed.

Daystar, taking her lead, sliced off the arms of another goblin and darted back before it could belt him across the face with its remaining limbs. Cimorene spared a second to run a critical gaze over his form, but despite his initial clumsiness, caused mostly by surprise, Daystar was handling himself well for a boy who had only ever drilled against his mother in the backyard. His footwork was still a little sloppy, and he had a tendency to leave his left side open — exactly why Cimorene hadn’t trained him with a shield, he would never learn to close his guard if he could rely on blocking with a giant metal plate instead — but he felled three rock goblins in succession, each time adapting his technique from the previous skirmish.

In the end they stood together, breathing hard amidst a pile of scattered stones, bruised and bleeding but overall unhurt. “Well,” Daystar said with forced cheer. “That was exciting.”

“You did well,” Cimorene said. She did not coddle her son, but no good came of withholding praise when it was due, and Daystar brightened. “Next time make sure you don’t leave your guard open, a faster opponent with a blade might have made quick work of you, but that was a respectable first fight.”

Daystar pushed a shock of hair out of his eyes, then, at Cimorene’s gesture, took a moment to examine his sword and wipe it down before returning it to its sheath. In the flurry of battle the leak of magic from the blade had been overshadowed by the energy of the fight, but now Cimorene felt it like a hard ache in the back of her teeth. Daystar didn’t notice her wince. “Where did you learn to fight rock goblins?” he asked. “That was incredible!”

“It is impressive what a person can learn from books,” Cimorene said. It was not even a lie; she’d come across the chapter on rock goblins in a bestiary, having more sense than to traverse their territory when living with Kazul. Fighting eagles and rock snakes had been excitement enough without bothering with creatures who possessed no internal organs or soft spots. Temporary dismemberment was the only way to defeat them, and even then they would soon be back. Already some of the rocks had begun to shiver, as the sympathetic bond between them called the pieces to each other.

Cimorene pulled on her boots, careful not to move them from their spot as she slid her feet inside and tightened the lacing. Funnily enough the fight had pushed away some of the bone-heavy exhaustion from travelling, filling Cimorene with a renewed sense of urgency and vigour. Daystar took his place on her feet again, cheeks still flushed and eyes sparkling, and Cimorene made firm her grip on his shoulder and stepped forward once more into the past.

 

* * *

 

Three steps before they reached their destination, a wave of exhaustion hit Cimorene hard, causing her to stumble as she made the next leg of the journey. Her balance rocked, and Daystar slipped from his position on her feet, sliding sideways as his weight jerked out from under him. His arms flailed to the side as the rest of him fell backward, and Cimorene’s mind exploded with a thousand warnings. She toppled, reaching out with all the urgency of the time he’d squirmed out of her arms as an infant, and caught hold of him a second before they lost contact with each other.

The movement jarred them both forward, sending them crashing to the ground, and Daystar yelped as Cimorene did her best to cushion him against the fall and only somewhat succeeded. Cimorene’s heart pounded, her elbow ached where she’d smashed it off the ground, but Daystar was here next to her, looking dazed and winded but not scattered halfway across time and space between boot-strides, so she would take the inconveniences without complaining, thank you kindly.

A moment later the nausea struck, and Cimorene turned and vomited into the grass.

“Mother!” Daystar burst out, scrambling to his hands and knees and kneeling beside her. He dug into his pockets and retrieved a handkerchief, which Cimorene took gratefully and wiped at her mouth. “Mother, whatever we’re doing, you’re pushing too hard. The boots are clearly not meant to be used with two people and you’re taking the strain. We have to rest.”

“We’re almost there,” Cimorene said. She attempted to push herself up onto her knees, but her arms trembled and her stomach clenched.

Daystar’s frown deepened, turning dangerously close to a scowl. “Mother, with all due respect, now you aren’t being sensible,” he said, drawing a startled laugh from Cimorene. “How many times have you told me that it makes more sense to rest now than to push through and make a silly mistake because you’re being stubborn?”

Cimorene fixed Daystar with a hard stare, but this time he didn’t back down, planting his hands on his hips and giving her the look right back. Finally Cimorene sighed and flopped back, careful not to touch her feet to the ground in any way that might be interpreted as a step, and loosened the lacings of her boots. “I suppose if you’re going to throw being sensible in my face,” she said, and Daystar flushed but continued to raise his eyebrows in a fairly good impersonation of Cimorene’s imperious get-rid-of-annoying-princes expression. “We may as well stop for the night.”

Daystar gave a satisfied nod, then took a moment to examine their surroundings. They had stopped at a field near the far edges of the Forest, and Cimorene could only hope that Daystar’s peasant’s knowledge of geography from Cimorene’s hand-sketched maps of the surrounding kingdoms would not allow him to pinpoint their location too quickly. They were at the back end of their circle now, and she didn’t need him to ask why they had travelled so far only to come back to the Forest just yet.

“We should find somewhere to sleep,” Daystar said dubiously. “I don’t mind sleeping on the ground, but if you’re overtired —“

Cimorene was about to protest that she was not overtired, and did not need to find somewhere special to rest, but the long-absent ghost of Morwen’s disapproval rose in the back of her mind and skewered her straight through. Instead she sighed and finished swapping out her boots for her regular pair, tugging them up and grimacing a little as the blisters rubbed. Sixteen years without any adventuring was a long time.

“You’ve been wearing the boots the whole time, and I know they do almost all the work for you, but all the stories say they’re tiring to wear,” Daystar continued, perhaps sensing his advantage. “ _And_ you’re carrying me too, which is not how they were designed to work —“

“Yes, all right,” Cimorene said, tugging him in and pressing a quick kiss to the top of his head. “Quit while you’re ahead, dear.”

They soon found the path, and not long after wandering along it they came to a small cottage. Cimorene hesitated, but arguing with Daystar over why they should avoid interactions with any other human being while being unable to explain why would take more effort than she felt herself capable of at the moment. All they had to do was minimize conversation, go to bed and leave early in the morning. Most people who took in strange travellers would be perfectly happy with that sort of arrangement.

“Nonsense!” said the woman who answered the door when Cimorene put forth her proposal, ushering them both in to their table. “We might not have much, but what we have we’re more than willing to share, and we welcome the company. It’s all anyone can do in times like these.”

Her husband agreed, immediately moving to fetch them both plates of food and a fresh pitcher of water from the well behind the house. Cimorene tensed at first, but if either of them had ever seen the Queen of the Enchanted Forest before, it would have been at a distance at some public function while dressed in full Willin-approved regalia. No one expected to see her dressed as a poor traveller, never mind at twice the age she was meant to be and accompanied by a half-grown son no one knew existed. Playing to people’s expectations could make for very effective anonymity.

The couple, whose names were Livia and Reinard, were content to keep up the chatter themselves, maintaining cheerful, idle conversation of little consequence that let the meal pass comfortably enough. Daystar seemed charmed by the company, and Cimorene was not inclined to discourage him, seeing as they had never had company or visited anyone else for dinner while living in the cottage. Daystar never complained, accepting the fact that his mother was a private person who preferred not to socialize, but seeing him now, the open interest on his face as he listened to the couple chat about their day, it struck Cimorene again how much of an ordinary life she had taken from him.

Livia and Reinard found Daystar to be a polite and pleasant boy; it was clear they found Cimorene a little off-putting, either by her reticence or her occupation as an adventuring mother on the wrong side of thirty-five, but rather than disapprove, Cimorene got the sense that they simply didn’t know how to draw her into conversation. She let Daystar handle the small talk and chose to listen instead.

Eventually, as Cimorene hoped it would, the talk turned to the current situation in the Enchanted Forest. “The King and Queen have both been gone for just over a year now,” said Livia, cutting a fresh slice of bread and handing it to Daystar with a thick cut of hard cheese. “The regent is doing his best to keep things running, but it’s not the same, you know. And the dragons are keeping the wizards out of the Forest, but they can’t very well cover the entire border, can they? So we don’t really know what’s going to happen in the meantime, or how long we’re meant to wait.”

“Seems to me like the magic of the Forest should have thought of something in cases when the King is disappeared but not dead,” Reinard said. “Can’t be the first time this happened, surely. What if a King got put under an enchanted sleeping spell for a hundred years? Is everyone just supposed to wait around with no ruler for a century?”

“I think that only happens to princesses, dear.”

“Well I think that’s being a bit old-fashioned, don’t you?” Reinard retorted. “Who says a Prince or a King can’t get enchanted? If I were a wizard and wanted to take control of a kingdom, that’s the first thing I’d try.”

Cimorene bit back a wince with many long years of diplomatic practice. Daystar set down his food and waited until he finished his current bite, then leaned forward in interest. “What happened to the King of the Enchanted Forest?”

Livia and Reinard exchanged glances. “You two not from around here?” Livia asked. “The fall of the castle is all anyone’s talked about for the last year at least.”

Cimorene cleared her throat. “We live simple lives,” she said. “Not much exciting news reaches us, I’m afraid.”

“So I see,” Livia said with some amusement, then launched into a highly sensationalized account of the wizard attack and a wildly inaccurate theory surrounding Mendanbar’s disappearance.

“Some people think he’s off gathering a secret army and will be back any day now,” Reinard said. “Others think the wizards kidnapped him and are holding him somewhere, but that’s obviously stuff and nonsense. If they had him we’d surely know it. The only thing we know for sure is that he isn’t dead. We aren’t in the Forest, of course, but even we felt a bit of it when the old King died.”

Daystar continued to look fascinated, but Cimorene did not want to wait for him to wonder whether she had heard any of this news or why she had never told him anything about the ruling family of the Enchanted Forest in any of her history lessons. “This was a lovely dinner, and we very much appreciate your hospitality,” Cimorene said. “Why don’t you let us do the dishes for you as our thanks?”

The couple protested, as Cimorene expected, but faced with — unbeknownst to them — the full force of Cimorene’s royal charm and Daystar’s country sincerity, they never stood a chance. And so the pair retired to the sitting room to relax while Cimorene and Daystar stood at the sink, Cimorene washing and Daystar drying.

“It’s funny how much can happen inside the Forest and we’d never know about it,” Daystar said. Cimorene said nothing, passing him a freshly-washed plate. “Do you think that’s what that wizard wanted this morning? Trying to find a way into the Forest so he could find the missing King and Queen?”

“It’s hard to say why wizards do anything,” Cimorene said mildly. “And Daystar, not to be impolite to our hosts, but political information received at the dinner table is not always reliable. This is true whether you’re talking to animals, dragons or humans, inside the Forest or anywhere else. Always remember to be critical of what you hear and wait for confirmation from multiple sources.”

“I suppose,” Daystar said, stacking the plate at the edge of the counter. But then he stopped, turning to Cimorene and tilting his head to the side. “Mother, I know you said you’re not going to tell me why we’re out here —”

Cimorene gave him a hard look. “Daystar —”

Daystar bit his lip. “Do you know where the missing King is? Is that what we’re doing?”

Cimorene exhaled. “Those plates are too close to the edge,” she said. “One false swipe with your elbow and they’ll go crashing to the floor. You should ask where they’d like them put away.”

Daystar’s brows knit together. “Mother —”

“Not _now_ , Daystar, have some sense,” Cimorene said, more snappish than she intended, but while he jerked back, he took the point rather than looking hurt or upset.

Livia and Reinard gave Cimorene the extra room, after apologizing that they didn’t have a second spare. Daystar cheerfully made up a bed for himself on the floor with extra blankets and cushions, apparently enjoying the wholesale experience of adventuring up to and including not having a proper place to sleep, and true to form he didn’t try to pester Cimorene for any more details.

Cimorene did not sleep well that night, although the bed was comfortable and the blankets soft and warm. She tossed and turned, the last of the backlash-induced nausea still churning in her stomach, the sheets twisting around her feet until she felt as though a creature had crawled into bed to attack her ankles.

So many years of lying to her son. Every day of his life she had lied to him, either by omission or outright falsehood, about his own identity, his parentage, about herself and their place in the world. Cimorene had deemed it necessary to save Mendanbar and the kingdom, and she’d sacrificed her own integrity and the trust between mother and son to do so, and that meant the quest had to succeed. She could not risk letting it fall apart now.

The next morning, Cimorene rose early before Livia and Reinard, roused Daystar, and insisted they leave before the couple woke. “We don’t want to trespass on their hospitality any longer than we need to,” she told him. “They treated us to dinner, let’s not linger and have it turn into breakfast as well. We have enough to last us, and I’m rested now.”

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going yet?” Daystar asked, then sighed and held up his hands. “Wait, no, that wasn’t fair. I said I’d trust you and I will — I do. You’ll tell me when it’s time.”

Cimorene exhaled slowly. “Let’s get moving,” she said, and picked up her boots.

The last three steps took very little effort at all, and they ended up right where Cimorene’s calculations had wanted to take them: at the entrance of the Forest on the far side of the Caves of Fire and Night, one of the lesser-travelled areas that tended to give visitors trouble unless they had official business with the royal family or a connection to the bloodline. No wizard had ever managed to cross over here, making it the best spot for Cimorene and Daystar to slip in unnoticed.

Daystar leapt down from Cimorene’s feet and looked around as she bent to change back into her walking boots. He stopped, looked up at the trees, then took a step back and shaded his eyes. “Mother,” Daystar said, confusion lacing his tone. Cimorene braced herself. “This is the Enchanted Forest.”

Cimorene tugged her boot into place and stood up without answering.

“We travelled fifty steps in seven-league boots,” Daystar continued to himself. “If you only needed to get to the other side of the Enchanted Forest, it wouldn’t take fifty steps, even if we went the long way around. We must have gone in circles, or backtracked at some point.”

In a remarkable testament to his fortitude and patience, Daystar did not immediately leap in with questions, or even pointed silence. He ran a hand through his hair, messing up the dark strands — Cimorene pictured his fingers getting caught in a gold circlet, knocking it rakishly astray — but then he sighed and shoved both hands in his pockets without saying anything else.

A warm glow of affection spread through Cimorene, and she rested a hand on his shoulder. “The less you know, the safer you are,” she said. “I promise I’m not keeping you in the dark for fun.”

Daystar quirked one eyebrow, an expression very much like his father’s when a visiting dignitary let something slip. “So there’s danger now? You didn’t mention that before.”

Cimorene shook her head at him, a small smile playing at her lips in spite of herself. “I can find you somewhere quiet to stay until I’m done, if you would prefer?”

“I’m fine,” Daystar said, and swept his arm in an elaborate bow toward the Forest. “After you, Mother.”

“First things first,” Cimorene said, and cast a spell of invisibility over both of them. Its effectiveness within the Enchanted Forest was limited, as the Forest tended to choose for itself whether to listen to outside magic or not, and some creatures could see through it, but any wizards wandering the area should be fooled as long as they were careful.

They stepped through into the Forest, and once again Cimorene felt the welcoming wave of familiarity wash over her as the light turned soft and green and the trees rustled around her.

“Oh!” Daystar said, looking down at the sword. “I didn’t — does it sense magic? It feels strange.”

“I’m not the one to ask about the sword,” Cimorene said. “Come now, we have a ways to go and the Forest likes to play tricks.”

Daystar followed obediently, touching his fingers to the hilt of the sword one more time in an experimental gesture before letting go. “Once this is over, will you tell me about yourself?” Daystar asked hesitantly. “You know magic, and sword fighting, and how to kill rock trolls, and I’ve never asked because I didn’t think it mattered, but clearly it does. I don’t care about my father, I’ve never met him and if you don’t want to tell me about him then he doesn’t matter to me, but is it so wrong to want to know who my mother is?”

“It’s not wrong,” Cimorene said slowly. “But you’re right about one thing, Daystar, now is not the time.”

The Forest shivered around them, and Cimorene gasped. “Mother?” Daystar asked, but she couldn’t answer. Her breath stuck in her chest, and she stepped forward, one hand pressed below her throat, into the clearing with the calm, clear pool that had been Mendanbar’s favourite sanctuary.

_Welcome back,_ whispered the Forest, as clearly as if it had spoke actual words. A soft breeze rustled the leaves, catching a few wisps of Cimorene’s hair that had escaped from her braids and brushing them across her face.

“It’s good to be back,” Cimorene said softly. She knelt and dipped her fingers in the pool, ignoring Daystar’s yelp of protest after hearing her many, many warnings about never touching an unknown body of water in the Enchanted Forest. She let the cool water run over her fingertips, feeling the faint tingle of magic, and turned her face to the swaying branches overhead. “Now, please take me to my husband.”

 

* * *

 

The years fell away as Cimorene journeyed deeper into the Enchanted Forest. Despite being double the age when she’d left Linderwall that first fateful day, Cimorene found a strange, almost carefree energy flowing through her. The last of the fatigue from using the boots fell away like a lindworm’s extra skins, replaced with the familiar and welcome burn of muscles in use. Cimorene had always had well-developed calves thanks to her habit of taking long walks, but the years of peasant life had given her strong arms and shoulders as well. She couldn’t help but think with wry amusement of the shrieks of horror her appearance would elicit from her parents or the other princesses of her former acquaintance now, not only for her simple, homespun clothing, but for the defined curve of muscle at her arms, legs and back that ruined the slim line of any clothing. Now, walking through the Forest, Cimorene felt the knots unclenching, her strides growing longer and looser as she travelled deeper and deeper into almost but not quite forgotten territory.

Still, Cimorene was careful not to let herself get complacent. The Forest had been her home for little more than a year, and during that time Cimorene had spent most of her time in the castle, tending to diplomatic nonsense that Mendanbar did his best to avoid, or off adventuring outside the Forest on various official or vaguely-disguised-as-official excuses to escape the castle for a few days. Cimorene’s knowledge of the Forest and its vagaries was many years outdated, and far less native than Mendanbar’s or Morwen’s. Most of it boiled down to common sense, really, but if Cimorene’s years of life experience had taught her anything, it was that the term was something of a misnomer.

Cimorene was leading them along the stream when she nearly tripped over a cat. More specifically, a lanky grey cat with a crooked tail and one ragged ear. Cimorene froze, and she nearly checked her invisibility spell except that no, of course there was no problem with her magic. Not with cats.

“Hello, Trouble,” she said.

Trouble’s tail lashed, and his ears flattened back against his skull. Daystar glanced at Cimorene. “You know this cat?” he asked. Trouble took a long look at Daystar, yellow eyes narrowed, then slitted his gaze back to Cimorene and let out a low yowl.

“He says you’re wrong,” said a voice from the tree overheard. Cimorene looked up to see a silver-furred squirrel eyeing Trouble with evident suspicion and natural dislike, but her twitching tail indicated too much curiosity for her to continue on her way.

Cimorene frowned. “Wrong about what?” she said, then a moment later remembered her manners. It had been a long time since she travelled through the Enchanted Forest, indeed. “Begging your pardon, madam, and I appreciate your help in translating.”

“Not wrong _about_ anything,” the squirrel corrected her, as Trouble continued to stare and protest. “He means _you’re_ wrong. You aren’t supposed to be here, and definitely not with _that_.”

Daystar looked offended at that, and Cimorene almost corrected him out of habit before realizing it was much better to let him think the animals had insulted him than draw attention to the sword. With a silent apology, she allowed Daystar’s misapprehension to continue and continued on. “Trouble, I’m doing what we agreed,” Cimorene said carefully. “And I’m very sorry, but I don’t have time to argue. Out of everyone, you understand that sometimes there’s no time to sit around and explain everything. I need you to trust me when I say that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

Trouble gave her another long look, ears splayed to the side, but then he sat back and brushed one paw over his ear before saying something that sounded almost self-satisfied. Cimorene glanced at the squirrel, who sighed, perhaps regretting her decision to get involved. “He said you look good for your age.”

Cimorene stopped for a moment to run the math in her head. Morwen’s cats tended to live a little longer than usual, thanks to the magic, but sixteen years ago Trouble had been an adult cat, not a kitten. By the time she’d left —

“It’s good to see you,” Cimorene said finally, and found she meant it. “You’re looking very well. But now I really must be going, Trouble. You can go check like Morwen asked you to, everything will be right where it’s meant to be. Just be careful.”

Trouble’s response to that particular invocation required no translation, and he practically dripped dignity as he melted away into the underbrush. Cimorene shook her head, then turned back to the squirrel, who sat on her branch and watched them. “Thank you again for your help,” Cimorene said. “Trouble and I are old friends, but I’m afraid I still can’t understand him.”

“Yes, cats are stubborn that way,” the squirrel sniffed. “I don’t know why they don’t just talk to everyone, like any sensible animal, but they have to be difficult and clannish about it. Makes them feel important, I suppose.”

“Perhaps,” Cimorene said, amused. “I hope you have a pleasant day.”

“You too, Your Majesty,” said the squirrel, and disappeared into the trees.

Everything stopped. Daystar’s shock rippled through the glade like a physical force, and when he turned to stare at her Cimorene’s felt his gaze bore through her as a wave of focused sunlight. “Mother —” Daystar said cautiously.

Cimorene exhaled. “We need to hurry,” she said. “We’re running out of time.”

“ _Mother_!”

“Daystar!” Cimorene said again, even as her frustration evaporated beneath the force of something that felt suspiciously like guilt. “We don’t have _time_.”

“Are you sure?” Daystar asked. His face flushed unevenly, and he pushed a hand through his hair again. “I don’t mean to be rude, Mother, but I get the feeling that you know exactly how to get us more.”

Cimorene almost laughed, less out of humour and more out of a release of tension, but she managed to stop herself at the last minute to avoid insulting him. Instead she took Daystar by the shoulders, watching as he gathered himself back under control. Warm pride filled her once again; she had raised a good son. “You have been very patient, I know. You’ve done everything I asked and haven’t complained or questioned. We’re at the end now, Daystar, only a little longer.”

Daystar chewed on his bottom lip, brows furrowed. “But they said you are the —”

Cimorene held up a hand in front of his lips, and he obligingly snapped his mouth shut. “Don’t say it,” she warned. “It’s not safe.”

Daystar looked intrigued rather than worried, unsurprising for a boy of sixteen even if he was generally sensible, and most of the overt frustration eased from his expression. “Soon?” he said at last.

“Soon,” Cimorene promised. “But we really do need to move quickly. Secrets don’t keep well in the Enchanted Forest.”


	3. In which Cimorene's plan has unforeseen complications

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cimorene and Daystar have arrived successfully in the past, but not everything is as simple as she hoped -- in more ways than one.

Cimorene followed the old route to the castle, and at the very least the Forest continued not to interfere with their journey. She stopped to recast the invisibility spell three times on the way just to be sure, and they managed to avoid several lost adventurers and one — Cimorene was fairly certain — enchanted prince in the form of a bewildered goose. There was a brief incident with a mischievous tree that attempted to ensnare Daystar, but after Cimorene gave it a stern talking-to, it released him with a decidedly sheepish rustle of its branches and let them be on their way.

At last they arrived at the castle. Daystar let out his breath in a low whistle, tipping his head back to peer at the impressive-looking structure, half hidden by the double layer of protective enchantments. “Our whole cottage could fit on the front lawn,” Daystar said, gesturing toward the grand garden and pavilion where, unbeknownst to him, his parents had said their marriage vows. “Are we supposed to get inside?”

“Yes.” Cimorene’s blood raced, and she fought back a wave of giddy excitement. Years of planning and research, bending over books and wearing out her mind and eyes and fingers, finally in front of her. “Now listen, this is going to be a little tricky —”

She felt the warning prickle of magic a second before the blast, giving her just enough time to shove Daystar out of the way. The spell narrowly missed Cimorene, a fire spell that singed her shoulder and filled the air with the nasty, choking scent of burned cloth and hair. She rolled to her feet, pulling her sword free, and came to face Zemenar and Antorell, standing side by side with the exaggeratedly haughty expressions they wore when trying to cover up surprise.

“Cimorene, I knew it was you,” Zemenar said, throwing back his shoulders. “I thought I sensed an invisibility spell. Once again your rudimentary magic is no match for ours.”

“Is that the wizard you melted before?” Daystar asked in a low voice. “The younger one, I mean. He doesn’t seem very good.”

“He isn’t,” Cimorene said with a twist of satisfaction, then whirled and pointed. “Argelfraster!”

They ducked just in time to avoid the melting spell, and Cimorene muttered an unladylike oath under her breath. “Will it work if I say it?” Daystar asked, out of breath, as he came up beside her. “Or would I need to do the initializing ritual to set up the spell first?”

“The latter, I’m afraid,” Cimorene said, but couldn’t help being impressed that he’d thought to ask. “Be careful, they aren’t very good wizards but they sometimes have a few tricks up their sleeves.”

Zemenar waved a hand, and a golden bubble appeared around him and Antorell, much like the one that surrounded the castle. Cimorene gritted her teeth, wondering how much stored magic he had to have stolen from other creatures to be able to keep that much locked away. “Ah, Cimorene, how I’ve missed you these last few months,” he said. Daystar shot her a sharp look but said nothing. “But really, I’m almost disappointed. An ageing potion, hiring this two-bit hero as muscle — where’s the spark? Where’s the old Cimorene, who would charge in with her friends and a half-baked plan and threaten us with little more than her sword and sharp tongue? It’s as though you’ve gone soft.”

Daystar hissed through his teeth. “I don’t think I like this one very much,” he said in a flat voice. “I never realized wizards were so impolite.”

“Indeed,” Cimorene said, never taking her eyes off the pair. “It’s one of their least attractive traits.”

Zemenar’s eyes narrowed, and his gaze turned to Daystar. “Cimorene, who is your hero? He doesn’t look properly trained, he doesn’t even have armour. Where did you find him? What is your name, boy?”

Cimorene’s breaths sounded very loud in her head, rushing like the echoes of waves inside a large stone cave. Daystar looked from Zemenar to Antorell, then his face resolved into a frown every bit as stubborn as his father’s while still maintaining a veneer of plausible politeness. “Please forgive my rudeness,” Daystar said in an even tone, “but I don’t believe this situation calls for introductions.”

“A cheeky hero,” Zemenar said dryly. “How original. Well, if we must —”

He raised his staff, safe from the melting spell within his protective enchantment, and began charging up a spell. Cimorene’s mind raced, and she stepped between Daystar and the wizards, turning so they couldn’t see her face. “You need to get inside the castle,” she said to Daystar, speaking very quickly. “Your sword will destroy the barriers. Once you’re inside, you have to find the King. You’ll know what to do.”

“What?” Daystar burst out. “But —”

“Do what I tell you!” Cimorene ordered, then shoved him back and ran at Zemenar and Antorell, her sword drawn. Zemenar’s barrier would protect him from magical attacks, not physical ones, and they would strike her down but not before she got them first. A wizard could cast a spell with a fatal wound, but he couldn’t survive much longer after that.

Of course, neither would Cimorene, but as long as Daystar made it out, none of it mattered. She found herself surprisingly at peace.

Zemenar’s face resolved into shock as Cimorene lunged for him. He turned — Antorell spun — their staffs aimed at her, Daystar forgotten exactly as she’d hoped — magic crackled in the air as they both prepared offensive spells —

“All right, that’s _enough_!” Daystar shouted from behind her, and the entire clearing exploded.

Not in fire, or sparks, but in a blinding flash of light and water and … _green_? Cimorene was flung to the ground as the very earth shifted, the glade rippling with low, rolling hills and tussocks and a scattering of fresh, young trees. Antorell went tumbling down a knoll away from Zemenar, breaking him free of the protective spell, and Cimorene pushed herself to her feet and stumbled over the uneven ground.

“Argelfraster!” she shouted once she was close enough, and Antorell, for once too stunned to complain as the melting spell took hold, dissolved into a puddle of goo without his customary moaning.

“You gave your hired hero _the_ _sword_?” Zemenar burst out, his words almost a shriek as he staggered to his feet, another spell already winding around the head of his staff. “Oh, I’m going to enjoy this. I always knew you were a stubborn, headstrong, impudent little minx who could never keep her nose out of anyone’s business, but now —”

Daystar, his face a thundercloud, brought the flat of his sword down on Zemenar’s head. The barrier spell collapsed in a silent thunderclap that echoed throughout the entire clearing before exploding in a shower of sparks, and when Zemanar flung his staff in front of his face to protect himself Daystar swung the sword down to meet it.

The staff splintered, and the shockwave flung both of them backwards. Cimorene was ready, scrambling to her feet and melting Zemenar before he could recover. The pieces of his staff were a lost cause, smashed as soundly as if someone had broken them up for kindling, and Cimorene couldn’t help but laugh as she dug through the puddle of goo for the rest of Zemenar’s effects, just in case.

Daystar sat up, stunned and wide-eyed, but with anger tightening the lines of his jaw. “Don’t talk to my mother like that,” he said, breathing hard, and made a face as though he would very much like to spit in the direction of the melted wizards but knew Cimorene would disapprove. Instead he stormed over to Antorell’s melted remains and jabbed at his staff with the sword until it too burst into splinters, this time managing to remain on his feet.

Cimorene gave up trying to be dignified as she toppled over onto her hands and knees. Each time the sword interacted with the wizards’ magic, the Forest bucked and rolled, new trees sprouting out of nowhere and fresh, springy moss carpeting the ground in a layer of brilliant green fuzz.

Finally Daystar looked over at Cimorene, his expression pained. “Now will you tell me what’s going on, Mother? Please?”

Cimorene fished a key from the mess that used to be Zemenar, dropped it with a hiss when it burned hot to the touch, then slipped it gingerly into her pocket. “I think you’ve earned that, yes,” Cimorene said. “Let’s get through those barriers and I’ll tell you everything.”

Back when the dragons put up the second shield, Kazul had taught Cimorene how to get inside without bringing it down, so that she could keep trying ways to bring down the wizards’ protective bubble until she finally gave up and admitted defeat. Now Cimorene motioned Daystar close, murmured the spell Kazul told her, and slipped through the momentary flicker in the protective enchantment.

They stood together between the two layers, glittering green and silver behind them and shimmering gold in front, and Cimorene’s heart took up renewed pounding in her chest. “All right, Daystar,” Cimorene said. “Take your sword, concentrate, and bring down that shield. I’m right here with you.”

Daystar glanced at her, grey eyes wide and solemn. “I’m not going to destroy the Forest, am I?”

“Most likely not,” Cimorene said, as that seemed a safe enough answer without sugarcoating. “But as soon as the barrier is down we’d better run, unless you want to be squashed between a tree and the dragons’ shield.”

Daystar made an alarmed face, then closed his eyes, let out a long breath, and raised his sword.

The shockwave when the barrier fell knocked Cimorene backwards right into the dragons’ shield, but she used it to propel herself forward. Daystar looked dazed, but Cimorene caught his arm and they dashed forward as around them the courtyard burst into an extension of the forest. Grass and moss shot out under their feet, the stones turning slippery with new growth, and they nearly fell at several points — once narrowly evading running straight into a tree that shot up right in front of them — but finally managed to make it to the front door without serious incident.

Winded, a little bruised and very much shaken, Cimorene pushed open the door, which fell open at her touch, and they staggered inside to the Great Hall. The lights flickered and caught, revealing the entranceway and its familiar, and fondly exasperating, opulence. Cimorene found herself laughing as she took it all in, from the sweeping balustrades to the unnecessary chandeliers to the paintings twice the size of their namesakes.

She came back to find Daystar watching her intently. “They were right,” he said slowly, and Cimorene wondered what he’d seen on her face just now. “You are the Queen of the Enchanted Forest. But unless you’ve been very busy when I wasn’t looking, you weren’t missing for one year, you’ve been missing for sixteen.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Mother, what is going on?”

Cimorene exhaled. “Come,” she said. “I’ll explain while we search.”

Cimorene led them through the palace looking for any sign of where the wizards may have hidden Mendanbar, giving Daystar an abridged explanation of his history. He took it all in wide-eyed, letting Cimorene explain without breaking in to ask too many questions, and when she finished he took only a moment to stop and lean, overwhelmed, against a dusty column.

“I mean, I’m sure every poor boy who lives alone with his mother likes to pretend there’s some secret story there,” Daystar said. “Mostly I was just hoping that whatever happened with Father wasn’t too sad, because I didn’t want you to be unhappy. I never imagined anything like this.” He gave her a baleful look. “I can’t believe you had me memorize the names of four hundred swords but I never thought to ask if anyone ruled the Enchanted Forest.”

Cimorene’s lips twitched in a smile she couldn’t quite keep off her face. “Take that as a lesson in providing selective information, dear. If you overload a person with details about one thing, they’re not likely to notice that they’re missing something else.”

“Devious,” Daystar said, sounding as though he didn’t know whether to be impressed or disturbed. It had been a long time since Cimorene had heard anyone speak in that tone around her, and truth be told, she’d rather missed it. “But the level of magical study it must have taken to pull this off —”

“I haven’t slept since you were born,” Cimorene said, with feeling. “But it worked, so that means it’s all worth it.”

Daystar started to say something but interrupted himself, frowning. “Wait — the sword, there’s something … I think we should go this way. I don’t know why, but it feels like something’s calling.”

Cimorene followed him through to a room she’d never spent much time in, where she yelped in surprise at the figure of Mendanbar lying prone on a long, low couch, hands folded across his chest. Daystar swallows. “Is that him?” he asked, his voice a whisper.

Cimorene’s pulse hammered in her ears, but as she stared at the figure, eyes narrowed, a niggling of suspicion formed in the back of her mind. She remembered what the wizards said, seventeen years ago: _We’ll put him through a door and hide the door_. That didn’t exactly jive with leaving him out on the sofa for anyone to walk by and see.

“Touch him with the sword,” Cimorene said. “Gently, just in case.”

Daystar did, laying the flat of the sword against Mendanbar’s arm, only to shout and jump back when the figure shimmered and melted into a puddle of mud. “A simulacrum,” Cimorene said, shaking her head. “I’m not surprised, Zemenar doesn’t trust his fellow wizards with anything.”

“So what, then?” Daystar looked around. “The sword called me here.”

“The wizards said they put him through a door and hid the door,” Cimorene said. “Like a transportation spell they stopped halfway, then bound to something physical to give it a focal point. Or at least, that’s what I was told. We just have to find whatever it is they made their key.”

Daystar left one hand on his sword as they searched, picking up knickknacks one-handed and turning over cushions. After a few minutes, however, Cimorene felt an odd weight settle over the room, and she turned to find Daystar watching her, brows knitted together once more. “What happens once we do this?” he asked.

Cimorene ignored the warning shiver that ran through her. “What do you mean? We wake your father and put everything to rights.”

“No, I mean —” Daystar swallowed a noise of frustration. “We could have done that back home, but we came _here_. There’s another me here somewhere, a baby, and another you, sixteen years younger. You waited all that time for me to grow up so you could bring me back here and have me wake the king just after I was born.” His hand tightened on the hilt of the sword. “We’re changing the past.”

Cimorene exhaled. “Yes.”

“So what will happen once we do that?” Daystar repeated. “What will happen to us?”

Cimorene drew her lower lip between her teeth before she could stop the nervous gesture. “I don’t know,” she said. “But all the magical theory says that the longer we’re here the more the universe is straining to maintain the paradox, and once we wake Mendanbar and defeat the wizards, that strain will be too much and the chain will snap.”

Daystar wet his lips. “What does that mean?”

“It means — magic always tries to go back to the way things were,” Cimorene said, casting about for a simple explanation, while simultaneously fighting the old fear that somehow she had misread or misinterpreted the theory. “Alchemy, equivalent exchange, magical equilibrium, every force exists in balance. If we change something that important, the universe will try to put it right. It will create a new fixed point from that event and shuffle everything around from there.”

Daystar’s face went pale as the blood drained from it. “So we won’t be us anymore. We’ll wake up and I’ll be a prince who’s lived in the castle since I was a baby, and you and my father will have been together since I was born. You, me, the cottage, everything we did together, my whole life — it will be gone.”

A heavy weight settled in Cimorene’s gut. “Yes.”

Daystar’s breath exploded from him in a wet burst. “Why?” he demanded. “Did you hate being poor that much that you’d want to erase it all and start over? I know our cottage was small and draughty and the roof leaked when it rained, but I loved fixing it with you, and I loved curling up in front of the fire with the quilt you made. I loved every single day in that cottage, Mother, and I thought —” He dashed a hand across his eyes, chest hitching. “I thought you did too.”

“Daystar, no!” Cimorene ran forward and moved to lay a hand on his shoulder, but Daystar jerked back out of reach. She tried again, speaking softer this time. “I loved the time I had with you, every day for sixteen years. I am your mother and I love you, and I don’t — I’m not giving up my years with you. It’s just that you deserve more.”

Daystar’s eyes blazed, looking so much like Cimorene’s own when she glared at her reflection in a fit of temper that she nearly laughed. She didn’t, of course, because teenage boys should never be laughed at by their mothers, even when out of genuine love and affection and a great deal of self-directed teasing.

“I don’t mean that I’m not enough,” Cimorene said gently, and Daystar subsided a little. “But your father loved you so much even before you were born, and to have all those years without each other … if I could find a way to bring the two of you together, of course I would do anything I could to make that happen.”

“But if everything rewrites itself around this new fixed point, then would I be really me, and would you be really you, and what would happen to the old me?” Daystar asked, then stopped and made a face as though biting into a sour piece of fruit. “Bother, now I sound like a philosopher. ‘Who are we’, ‘how do we know we are who we are’, that sort of thing, but you know what I mean. I never actually needed anything but the life you gave me, Mother. I wish you’d asked me what I wanted.”

Cimorene’s legs buckled, and she caught herself on the edge of the sofa before they gave out completely. She let herself fall onto the couch, resting her elbow against the arm so she could lower her head into her hand. “I’m sorry,” Cimorene said, keeping her eyes closed against whatever expression sat on Daystar’s face at the moment. “You’re right, I didn’t ask you about what you wanted, and I should have. That was selfish of me, Daystar, and I apologize.”

For a long moment the only sound that filled the room was the rustle of fabric as they shifted and the harsh rasps of their breathing. At long last Daystar let out a quiet cry, then the couch dipped as he dropped down to sit beside her. “Mother, no, I’m sorry,” he said. “This is all new and strange and a little scary, but you’ve only ever wanted what’s best for me, I know that.” He hesitated, and when he continued his words came out in a rush. “And I shouldn’t have said what I said about being poor. I know that was stupid and cruel. It wasn’t about the cottage or the castle, was it. It was about Father. It’s not just me you want him to have those years with, it’s you.”

Cimorene sighed and resisted the melodramatic urge to drag a hand down her face. “I met him when I was barely eighteen years old,” she said. “It’s been almost eighteen years since I’ve seen him. We only had one year together before this whole business with the wizards started.”

“That’s a long time to wait,” Daystar said cautiously.

“I didn’t wait,” Cimorene reminded him fiercely. “You’re right that I miss Mendanbar, but you were right about another thing, too. I wasn’t just waiting — I was living my life, with you.”

Daystar smiled, and he leaned in against her side, letting his head rest on her shoulder. Cimorene took several long, measured breaths, hardly knowing what she was even hoping for, until Daystar sat up again. “Let’s do it,” he said. When Cimorene opened her mouth to speak, he held up a hand. “No, I mean it. All those years we had, they happened, and nothing can take that away from me. But you deserve to have a life with your husband and your family, and it would be selfish of me to keep you all to myself. Besides, if you love my father that much then so will I.” He grinned, somewhere between sheepish and charming. “Maybe almost as much as I love you.”

“Now you’re laying it on a little thick,” Cimorene said, but pulled him in for an embrace anyway. Daystar held tight, the way he used to do as a child when the night terrors woke him screaming, and Cimorene hugged him back just as hard.

Finally she drew back, and when she did she felt the key poke her at the hip. Cimorene pulled it from her pocket — carefully, but the initial burning sensation seemed to have faded — and turned it over in her hand.

“What is that?” Daystar asked.

“I don’t know, Zemenar had it on him,” Cimorene said slowly. “It burned me when I picked it up, as though it were on —”

She stopped, turned to stare at the brazier in the middle of the room, burning merrily despite no one having entered to stoke the coals for at least a year. And since when did the castle have a brazier in the first place? Not a fireplace or a hearth but a five-foot brazier, nowhere near the kitchen?

Cimorene stood up, crossed the room and dropped the key directly onto the coals.

For a moment nothing happened — then flames, then darkness, then a warm, orange glow, and magic so strong Cimorene felt it prickle along her skin. “Oh!” Daystar said. “Do you feel that? It’s like soup, almost.”

“Magical soup,” Cimorene said, amused in spite of herself, but she felt nothing else except a rising sense of urgency. How long until the backlash and they were sent to a new future? What if they didn’t succeed at their task before it happened?

Daystar shifted his grip on the sword as though it was uncomfortable to hold, and an idea struck. “Do you remember the spell I taught you?” Cimorene asked. “The dragon spell for reversing magic, the one you modify for whatever you need it to do?”

“Yes, but — oh!” Daystar stepped up to the edge of the brazier and closed his eyes, raising the sword.

“ _Power of water, wind, and earth,_

_Turn the spell back to its birth._

_Raise the fire to free the King,_

_By the power of sword we bring._ ”

This time everything happened all at once. Fire and light and thunder, rumbling and roaring and shaking the castle. Cimorene stumbled as the floor rocked beneath her feet, striking her head against the hard stone. Sparks flashed across her vision before darkness closed in from all sides. She tried to call out to Daystar, but everything went black.

 

* * *

 

Cimorene woke to the sensation of a light breeze stirring through the open window. She opened her eyes, winced at the headache lurking behind her skull — then jerked to a sitting position as she recognized the soft, luxurious bedding of the royal chambers. “It worked!” she gasped. The magic had snapped, the universe had reset itself, and somehow in the middle of it she had been sent back. She flung back the quilts —

— and stopped, looking down at her simple, homespun travelling garb that she’d brought with her from her cottage. Cimorene raised one hand to her head and felt a linen bandage, sticky with dried blood, her hair pulled back in a simple braid hanging down her back.

“I’m glad you’re awake,” said a very familiar voice. Cimorene stopped breathing. “If you slept any longer I was worried he might try to run off and find a more competent healer than me, and that wouldn’t be a very good first impression.”

Tears stung Cimorene’s eyes, and she turned to see Mendanbar standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame and grinning at her. His tired grey eyes sparkled, and his gold circlet sat askew in his rumpled black hair, exactly like she remembered.

He was also, thanks to the particulars of the stasis spell, only a handful of years older than Daystar, which rather prevented Cimorene’s original plan of throwing herself at him and kissing him breathless. “He’s a good boy,” Cimorene said, somewhat at a loss. “And you were never any good at healing, so you may as well come clean now.”

Mendanbar mimed an arrow strike to the heart. “You hit your head when the spell shook the castle,” he explained, coming in and taking a seat beside her. He held his hands in his lap, curling his fingers as though he wanted to touch her but wasn’t sure. “Daystar — he told me what you did. I hope you realize how amazing that is, and I don’t just mean theoretically. Although I do also mean theoretically; you don’t know how much I’m restraining myself from peppering you with all kinds of annoying questions about the details.”

“Except it didn’t work,” Cimorene said. “We rescued you, but we were supposed to go back. Everything was meant to rewrite itself once we’d altered a fixed point.”

“Ah, yes, he said that.” Mendanbar pushed his hand through his hair, the gesture so familiar that Cimorene’s chest ached. She wanted to kiss him, to throw her arms around him and kiss him, but while she couldn’t say why, she felt as though an invisible barrier sat between them. “I have a theory about that. The magical theoreticians who posited temporal backlash were thinking about time travel mechanics in the same way as ordinary magical travel — moving the traveller from one place to another, like magicians or wizards.”

“And overdoing it on those kinds of spells is what leads to backlash, not using seven-league boots, which use the boots, rather than the user, as the locus for folding time,” Cimorene finished. Mendanbar looked startled, then favoured her with a slow grin that made her cheeks burn. “Mendanbar!” Cimorene burst out, trying not to feel pleased. “Not the time!”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t seen my wife in a long time, and then you come in here talking complex magical theory to me, you have to admit …” Mendanbar cleared his throat. “But no, you’re right. When seven-league boots wear out, there’s no backlash, you just need new boots. You might get tired, or dizzy, or even nauseous if you try to travel too far without rest, but that’s like any kind of ordinary travel. Add time into the mix and it’s no different.”

“So no backlash,” Cimorene said slowly. Horror crept over her, tracing icy fingers across the back of her neck.

Mendanbar wet his lips. “Not until you go back.”

The jolt hit hard. Her head throbbed, and Cimorene raised one hand to her temple. “Go back?” she echoed faintly.

“I think so,” Mendanbar said, his voice quiet and careful, as though trying not to spook a wounded animal. “I’m not an expert on this — this was some advanced magic you managed to cook up — and Daystar only managed to explain so much to me second-hand, but if I’m right, the boots are holding everything together. You’ll have to retrace your steps, walk back along the same path until you come back to the moment you left and close the loop. At that point the boots should release any excess temporal energy and be rendered inert. I’ll forget you were here, you’ll forget you ever left, and our lives will continue on from there.”

Cimorene closed her eyes against the pressure building up behind her sockets. “So instead of the universe rewriting itself to avoid a paradox, I — what, create two versions of time, like paths in a forest? One where I come back and rescue you, where you and the younger version of me and Daystar live out your lives together, and one where I go home and do it all over again?”

Mendanbar reached out and took her hand. Cimorene gripped hard, relishing the sensation of him here, solid and real, after so many years. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know this can’t be what you wanted. Daystar said you did this so we could be together, so I wouldn’t have to miss the first sixteen years of his life. That’s — I want you to know that’s amazing, Cimorene, it’s the most incredible thing anyone has ever done.”

Cimorene released her breath in a hard exhale. “Just tell me you won’t waste it,” she said. She fixed her gaze out the window at the tree outside, and beyond it, the silver-and-green shimmer of the dragons’ protective barrier. Mendanbar must have waited to talk to her before going outside, to give her the chance to come to terms with everything before alerting the entire Forest to his return. He always was considerate. “When you — get them back, I mean. My Daystar and I might not get these years with you, but there’s a Cimorene and Daystar who will. Tell me you’ll make them count.”

“Of course I will!” Mendanbar said, every bit as earnest as Cimorene remembered. “My god, Cimorene, I promise.”

Cimorene looked down at their joined hands and couldn’t help a smile. “At least now that I’ve done it once, I know we can do it again,” she said. “Though next time I think I’ll have Daystar go on his own. For the real quest the boy probably shouldn’t have his mother along with him.”

“I don’t know, he seems to have enjoyed your company,” Mendanbar said, grinning. “He obviously adores you. It makes me very happy to see that. Whatever happens, I know he’ll be all right.”

Cimorene glanced at him, every bit as young and handsome as she remembered, and not a day older. “Just tell me one thing,” she said, even as her cheeks grew hot with shame. Such a stupid, vain question, one a young Cimorene would have scoffed at, but now she found herself unable to move past until she asked it. “When we married I was younger than you. If you woke up the same age you are now and instead of the Cimorene you remembered, you saw me —”

Mendanbar took her face in his hands, stroking his thumb across her cheek. Cimorene’s breath caught, and she had to remind herself not to close her eyes and sink into his touch. “Cimorene,” Mendanbar said seriously. “You are my wife, now and forever. You are beautiful then, now and always. There is no world, no time, no universe, no version of me where I will ever be disappointed in what I see.”

Cimorene let out a faint laugh and brushed at her eyes. “Well,” she said. “I suppose that answers that.”

Right then, however, Cimorene knew she had to go. The longer she stayed, the more they touched, the harder it would be to leave, and she didn’t belong here. This Mendanbar was not hers; he had a wife and infant son waiting for him in a cottage just outside the Enchanted Forest, and a whole new life to lead.

And Cimorene had a life of her own as well, one that she and Daystar would carve together. Different from the one she expected, perhaps, but a good life, strong and true. They had come this far together, and would not fail each other now.

 

* * *

 

After that it didn’t take long. Mendanbar helped Cimorene reverse the spell on the boots so that they would take her forward, rather than backwards, in time, then the three of them walked to the edge of the dragons’ boundary. “As soon as this falls, the wizards will know what happened,” Mendanbar said. “The two of you should be prepared to hurry. You don’t want to be here when everything goes down.”

“Are you going to be all right?” Daystar asked once they stepped through. “I can’t imagine they’ll be very happy to see that you’ve escaped.”

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” Mendanbar said with a savage smile. “I have plenty of friends to gather and a lot of pent-up frustration to dole out. Don’t you worry about the Enchanted Forest. The two of you just focus on getting home. Actually … you said the entrance on the far side of the Caves?”

Mendanbar waved a hand, fingers twitching as though plucking the strings of a harp. The Forest rippled around them, blurring like a watercolour painting smeared with a wet brush, then coalesced at the very spot where Cimorene and Daystar had entered the Forest.

“Wow.” Daystar blinked. “How did you —”

“You’ll learn, don’t worry,” Mendanbar said, eyes twinkling. He clapped Daystar on the shoulder and looked him over once more, his gaze fond. “You’re a fine young man, Daystar. You do your mother credit.”

Daystar flushed, but refrained from scuffing at the ground with his boot even though his foot twitched with the impulse. “Thank you,” he said, standing up straight, then added, almost shyly, “Father.”

Cimorene didn’t dare making a farewell speech to Mendanbar, and he seemed to sense why not. He said nothing as she tugged off her walking boots and shoved her feet into the seven-leaguers, but when she moved to lace them he held out a hand. “Let me,” he said, and knelt. Cimorene’s insides flipped as Mendanbar balanced himself with one hand curled around her calf, his fingers and thumb five points of contact that burned against her skin like a brand. He tugged the laces tight, looped and tied them, then ran his fingers along the tops of the boots to check for chafing. Cimorene swallowed hard, her breath sounding loud and ragged in her own ears, and she clasped her hands tight behind her back.

Finally Mendanbar stood up, and he flashed her a small, lopsided smile. “There,” he said, just shy of cheeky. She still felt the ghost of his fingers on her leg, and was very conscious of Daystar in the background, watching. “Now you’re set.”

Cimorene took a moment to clear her head, shake herself out before inviting Daystar — blushing furiously, poor boy — to take his place on her feet. “Best of luck against the wizards,” Cimorene called over her shoulder to Mendanbar without looking. She couldn’t look at him, not again. “Tell Kazul to eat Zemenar and Antorell for me. They’re conveniently melted right now and everything, she could drink them up like soup.”

“You know, it’s a wonder we never tried that,” Mendanbar said, laughing. “I’ll have to ask Telemain what happens if a wizard attempts to reconstitute inside a dragon’s stomach. Godspeed, you two.”

Cimorene took a deep breath, steadied herself, and stepped forward.

* * *

 

They didn’t talk much on the journey home. Daystar kept his gaze down, his expression turned inward, and Cimorene preoccupied herself with tracing her exact path back so that her thoughts couldn’t wander. They still had a little extra food, and so rather than push right to the end and have to waste a night like the last time, Cimorene stopped them at the halfway point to sit and finish the last of the provisions.

The way back felt different somehow, but Cimorene couldn’t decide whether her mood was affecting her perception or if things had actually changed. She thought she sensed a slight misty quality to the world around them, like early morning in the mountains before the sun rose fully and brought all the colours with it. Then again, that could very well be affectation, her emotions leaching the brightness from her surroundings as she fought to retain the drive and anticipation she’d carried with her on the journey out.

By the time they reached their cottage, the weather had definitely changed. Whether because of slight variations in the fabric of time, or because of how long they had spent in the Enchanted Forest before returning, a low fog had crept down from the distant mountains and surrounded their cottage in a ghostly white shroud.

“Well, we made it,” Cimorene said, as Daystar hopped down and stumbled back, looking a little paler than usual. She bent to undo the laces on her boots, easing her feet out of them with a groan of relief. “How are you feeling?”

“A little strange,” Daystar said, then pitched forward.

Cimorene rushed forward to catch him, but the ground caught both of them first.

 

* * *

 

Cimorene woke to the sound of birds chirping and the rustle of leaves outside the cottage window. Her head felt thick, as though stuffed with wool, and heavy with the fragments of a forgotten dream. She rubbed a hand across her eyes and sat up, doing her best to blink away the last of the morning confusion.

Cimorene swung her legs over the side of the bed, bare feet striking the smooth wood floor. The breeze wafted warm and pleasant through the open window, bringing with it the faint trace of wildflowers, and Cimorene found herself smiling. Though she couldn’t explain why, she had a good feeling about today.

“Now I know it’s going to be a good vacation if I’m awake before you in the morning,” said a voice from the door. “I knew keeping your cottage hideaway as our secret family rendezvous was an excellent idea. No Willin can interrupt our mutual ravishing with matters of state today, no thank you.”

“Hush, you!” Cimorene admonished, shooting Mendanbar a pointed look at the open door. “What if Daystar hears you?”

Mendanbar, holding a tray laden with fruits, snickered as he kicked the door closed behind him. Streaks of grey touched his hair at the temples. “Light of my life, if you think I haven’t kept meticulous care of every soundproofing enchantment I’ve laid on every single bedroom we own since that boy was old enough to toddle, then you are either shockingly naive or have very little faith in me.”

He set the tray down next to the bed and tackled her, tangling his hands in Cimorene’s hair and kissing her deeply. Cimorene kissed back with enthusiasm, tugging Mendanbar’s shirt free of his loose sleep trousers and running both hands over his chest and back.

Mendanbar pulled back, rumpled and grinning, and brushed his thumb over Cimorene’s lower lip. “Well good morning to you too,” he said. “Honestly, I was just going to bring you breakfast in bed, but if you insist …”

A strange twisting made itself felt in Cimorene’s chest. “I don’t know,” she said, reaching up to hold Mendanbar’s face in her hands. “I suddenly feel as though — as though it’s been a very long time.”

“Oh, but it has,” Mendanbar said in mock seriousness, ruining the effect almost immediately with his waggling eyebrows. “Last night had to be what, at least eight hours ago? Scandalous. I should be forced to abdicate for neglecting my wife so terribly.”

Later, after Cimorene deemed them presentable enough so as not to scar their teenage son by making their morning activities too obvious, Cimorene and Mendanbar headed down to the breakfast table. Daystar was already there, hair mussed, yawning to himself as he tossed some eggs in a pan over the stove, and he gave them both a sleepy, somewhat confused smile as they sat down.

“I thought we might go into town today,” Daystar said, poking at the eggs. “They’re supposed to have a craft market, we could go poking around and see what they have. Maybe if there’s anything good you could bring them in as a palace connection, Father. Nothing like shopping local.”

“That’s good thinking,” Mendanbar said, shooting Cimorene a proud grin. “And I do love wandering around incognito.”

“The peasant look does suit you very well,” Cimorene said, smiling a little. Mendanbar wore the simple, homespun shirt and trousers well, without the awkwardness of most adventuring princes who found their disguises troublesome. She herself had found over the years that the freedom of a poor woman’s wardrobe was vastly superior to heavy gowns and —

Cimorene did not do anything so dramatic as fall off her chair, but her brain enjoyed a solid mental rendition of it. “Daystar,” she said casually, oh so casually. “Do you remember the name of the farmer who brings his bees to the market?”

“Farmer Montgomery?” Daystar said, brightening. “Oh, I like him, he always lets me take some honeyco…” He trailed off, frowning in confusion, then he turned and locked gazes with Cimorene, eyes wide. “Mother—” he said, breathless.

“Don’t let the eggs burn,” Cimorene said quickly, and Daystar turned back to the stove.

Mendanbar blinked. “Have you two been sneaking off to the farmer’s market without me?”

With that first gate opened, the rest of the memories flooded in. Years of studying and practicing magic, raising Daystar alone in this very cottage; lashing modified seven-league boots to her feet, Daystar standing on her toes, and marching sixteen years back in time to rescue Mendanbar and set things right.

Yet at the same time Cimorene remembered other things, too. She remembered sitting out on the grass with Daystar, blowing bubbles for him with dishsoap and a loop of wire, when Mendanbar walked up the path to the front gate. Remembered picking up Daystar, holding him to her chest while she reached for the sword she kept behind the door, demanding to know why this stranger wore her husband’s face. Remembered Mendanbar telling her that the wizards’ containment spell had failed all on its own, that he’d woken up help the dragons and allies of the Enchanted Forest win a battle against the wizards, and that Morwen had told him where to find her.

Sixteen years of memories: sixteen years of raising Daystar alone, sixteen years of raising him with Mendanbar at her side. Two lives, together in her mind, and for a floundering moment Cimorene lost her hold on which belonged where. But then she caught them, found the current and let it carry her, and opened her eyes again to find herself in the kitchen with her husband and son once more.

Cimorene had gone back in time to rescue Mendanbar and give herself back those sixteen years. At first she thought she’d lose the first set; then she’d thought she would never get to see the second. Now, it turned out she was wrong — yet somehow right — both times. The ghost of her first life lingered like a dream, except Cimorene knew with a strange, awed certainty that this dream would not fade.

“I’d hardly call it ‘sneaking’ when you decide that a vacationing king shall not rise before ten,” Cimorene said, and Daystar laughed as he slid the only slightly crispy eggs onto a plate. “What can I say, we must be better suited to the simple life than you.”

“As long as you come back with me to the castle when it’s time to go, you can be as devoted to peasantry as you like in the meantime,” Mendanbar said, reaching over to ruffle Daystar’s hair. 

Daystar shot Cimorene a furtive glance, but she only tapped his plate to start him eating. “Don’t worry, dear,” Cimorene said. “We won’t abandon you to diplomatic incidents and princes and ambitious aunts. We’ve come too far together to leave you now.”

Mendanbar smiled fondly, Daystar dug into his eggs with an appetite no palace-born prince could ever truly appreciate, and outside a chorus of chaffinches burst into joyous song.


End file.
